


The Mermaid

by WhyNotFly



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: A little bit of pining, Allusions to non-consensual body modification, Brief choking on water, Canon typical Mary Keay being an abusive parent, Captivity, First Kiss, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mermaid Gerry, Sign Language, Underage Smoking, mermaid au, they're both teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-21 15:21:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30023802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhyNotFly/pseuds/WhyNotFly
Summary: The first time Jon came to the aquarium (after he got over the panic attack he’d dropped into seeing the mermaid twist its way out of the dark water towards him), he’d asked the mermaid for his name.  The second time he came (when he thought ahead enough to bring a sign language dictionary), the mermaid told him it was Gerry.Which is a very strange name for a mermaid to have.
Relationships: Gerard Keay/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 12
Kudos: 88
Collections: TMA Valentine's Exchange 2021





	The Mermaid

**Author's Note:**

  * For [god_commissioned_me](https://archiveofourown.org/users/god_commissioned_me/gifts).



“Jonathan, you’re going to break your back with all of that.”

Jon tugs fruitlessly at the old broken zipper of his backpack, ignoring the way his grandmother looks at him as she moves from the doorway to the sink, holding her empty glass beneath the faucet. She turns on the water and her next words are lost beneath the rush. Probably something like _how can you possibly need so many books, Jonathan?_ Or _Where are you going so early in the morning?_ Or _If you have time to muck about you have time to stay and help me dust_ and Jon isn’t really interested in sticking around to hear any of it. He abandons the zipper as a lost cause and grabs his backpack around the middle, hoisting it up and shouldering his way past the screen door, out into the mist-filled morning. It lands like a thousand tiny fingers on his bare arms and he shivers.

“Jonathan!” His grandmother shouts from inside the house. “Take a jacket!”

But he’s already gone.

It’s hard to make a new discovery in a town you’ve lived in all your life. Books make it sound so easy, as if children are constantly opening their wardrobes and finding portals to magical fantasy worlds, but in Jon’s experience, most doors aren’t worth opening. The ones that hold genuine secrets won’t let you walk back out again. All the rest? Dusty corners and tourist traps, shops full of cheap trinkets made of seashells, sections of the video store full of adult tapes, stone grottos on the beach that only leave him wet and gritty and fed up by the end of the day. Nothing of any value, not even a good ghost story. 

Jon had a planner on his desk where he ticked off the days til Oxford’s entrance ceremony like a prisoner leaving tally marks in chalk. Two years, four months, and 17 days. All he had to do between then and now was get in, and then he’d finally be free. 

All the best ghost stories probably happened at University.

By the time Jon makes it to the aquarium, his arms are aching. He would never admit it, but his grandmother might have a point about the number of books he hauls out here every weekend. He’s already had to sew the strap back on his backpack twice. But he’s been over the stack and he needs them _all_. He can’t very well waste time with being unprepared. Every time he wedges his way under the fence and ducks beneath the bottom of the rotted-through door, he half expects to discover it was all a dream. A hopeful delusion of his grieving mind trying to rationalize the world he doesn’t understand his place in. Like Dr. Maizel always says.

But as Jon pads his way through the dark, abandoned room, the tank at the back is still there. And the mermaid is still inside.

All the other kids ignore the aquarium, which was honestly what had drawn Jon there in the first place. It had shut down decades ago, long before Jon was born, and even when it was in its prime it had been a pretty sad establishment, according to his grandmother. A little tide pool with clams to pick up. A tank full of tired looking fish. Most tourists didn’t really want to spend their beach vacation looking at fish _inside_ and when it went out of business no one bought the property. It’s been there ever since, collapsing slowly into itself like a tree beginning to rot. The boards are half pried off the doors by teenage vandals, the walls packed with overlapping graffiti. By now it’s been picked clean and the mystery—if there ever was one in the first place—is gone. Jon hoped it would be somewhere just for him, a quiet, empty place to come and be alone without the constant battling noise of life and other children and his grandmother and all the mundane nothings that clamor for his attention. He hadn’t expected it to be occupied.

Jon waves through the glass and the mermaid waves back, pressing forward eagerly to watch as Jon pulls out his electric lantern and then begins to spread his reference books all around him. An Introduction to Marine Biology. Fish Species of the Atlantic. Folktales of the Sea. English Myths. The British Sign Language Dictionary.

“You’re a lot of trouble, do you know that?” Jon sighs, looking up at his mermaid and shaking his head. “You’re a five book problem.”

The mermaid grins, showing off his sharp teeth, and rests his chin on his hands as if he’s trying to look innocent. Then he laughs, silent bubbles wobbling up from the thin gills on his neck. He twists his hands and then cups them together, pushing them forward just a bit.

This one doesn’t need the dictionary. “Yes,” Jon says with a sigh that’s more for comedic effect than anything. “You’re worth the effort.”

The mermaid is a very strange creature. He’s beautiful, sure, in that ethereal supernatural kind of way that Jon supposes all mermaids must be born with. He’s pale—not like a ghost, more like a shut in—and his skin is covered in little black spots that look almost like eyes. When he signs, Jon would swear the ones dotted over his knuckles wink right at him. His eyes are a deep black, matching his hair which floats loose and long around him in the water. And then, of course, there is the tail. Long and sinewy, able to curl in on itself around and around, bonelessly. Sometimes, Jon’s torchlight catches it and it shimmers iridescent rainbows, but usually it descends endlessly black into the darkness at the bottom of the empty fish tank. As far as Jon could tell, the mermaid was the only creature left. Floating all alone behind the huge floor-to-ceiling glass viewing window. Jon tried not to think about what he must be eating.

The first time Jon came to the aquarium (after he got over the panic attack he’d dropped into seeing the mermaid twist its way out of the dark water towards him), he’d asked the mermaid for his name. The second time he came (when he thought ahead enough to bring a sign language dictionary), the mermaid told him it was Gerry.

Which is a very strange name for a mermaid to have. 

Jon scurries forward on his knees to grab for the dictionary as Gerry begins signing at him more frantically. He’s been studying it on his own time, but he’s far from fluent, and Gerry has to repeat his message a few times, slowing it down further and further as he waits for Jon to catch up.

“You don’t…” Jon trails his gaze down the page, studying the diagrammed hands with a furrowed brow. “You don’t like the week? Why?” 

Jon glances up and watches as Gerry crosses his forearms into an X and then pokes a finger into the glass, pointing straight at Jon.

“Ah.” Jon looks down at his dictionary and ruffles the pages a bit until he feels in control of the treacherous heat in his cheeks. “Yes, well, I would rather spend all my time here as well if I had the choice. It’s certainly more educational than school has been recently.”

Another laugh bubbles up through the water and Gerry skates the palm of one hand up the side of the other, before flattening one down and brushing off again.

“Learning a new language is a stretch,” Jon says, rolling his eyes. “I feel like an idiot.”

Gerry pouts and knocks his knuckles once against the glass with a dull thump. He places the tip of his thumb against his forehead and arcs it forward. Jon looks down and flutters through his pages.

“Smart?” Jon snorts. “Yes. I am very smart. Really the one positive character trait I seem to have going for me. How do you make things sound so sarcastic while signing them?”

Gerry points at his facial expression and then sticks out his tongue. It’s so simple and smooth, the way he moves through the water, every gesture necessarily slow and deliberate like a dancer. Jon feels thick and useless next to him. How can a mythological creature somehow be a more successful human than Jon himself?

“Yes,” Jon says, after a few awkward minutes spent interpreting. “I am planning to go to Oxford. You know, a mermaid really shouldn’t know what Oxford is. How do you even know BSL?”

Gerry raises a judgmental eyebrow and then taps his chest, bounces both hands flat towards the ground.

Jon narrows his eyes. “I don’t think England accepts mermaids as legal citizens.”

That same grin, pressed into the glass at the front of the tank. On anyone else, Jon would have found it insulting, but somehow, on Gerry, it looks friendly. Like Jon is actually in on the joke. Like Jon is actually the person Gerry wants to be talking to. Even though it’s silly to believe that, just because Gerry is stuck behind glass and has no other options. Maybe it’s just selfishness, keeping all of this a secret. Maybe Jon just wants something that’s _his_.

Gerry is signing again, and Jon scrambles out of his thoughts to grab for his dictionary. _You_ (Jon can follow that one, it’s simple enough). Gerry waves his hands downward and then taps his forehead, _don’t know_ (Jon flips through the pages as Gerry flicks his palms outward). _Anything._

_You don’t know anything about me._

“True. There’s still so much I don’t understand.” Jon leans over and rifles through his threadbare backpack, the fabric torn from years of overuse. He pulls out a journal, small and purple, with a soft cloth cover, the spine bulging around the pencil shoved inside. Jon flips to the marked page and takes the pencil, chewing absentmindedly at the eraser. At the top of the page, he’s written _The Mermaid_ in letters grown bold and dark from weeks of repeated tracing, hours of Jon sitting in his room, reading and rereading the messy scatter of his notes and findings, as if he could figure out the truth by ramming his head against it hard enough.

His grandmother always tells him he’s an obstinate child. 

“So let’s get started with the questions.”

***

“When taking the derivative of a composite function, one must be careful to remember to apply the chain rule, which states that the derivative of f of g of x is actually equivalent to the derivative of f of g of x multiplied by the derivative of g of x. The chain rule should be applied to any nested function, multiplying in each new layer, so that the derivative of f of g of h of i of x is f of g of h of i of x multiplied by the derivative of g of h of i of x multiplied by...”

Jon peeks up over his textbook to see if Gerry’s fallen asleep on him. Jon’s certainly on the verge of it himself, wading through all this prep for his A levels. It makes it more bearable, reading it out loud to Gerry, and Jon tends to internalize things better by explaining them to others. But the poor mermaid is already stuck in a cage, Jon doesn’t have to torture him with _calculus_.

And yet, when Jon looks up, Gerry is focused just as intently as he always used to be when Jon would read him stories to pass the time. Pressed up near the front of the glass, eyes squarely on Jon. Gerry has a particular power in his attention that always leaves Jon feeling like his stomach is made out of graham cracker, liable to crumble at any second. Maybe it’s some kind of mermaid ability, like the stories about the sirens who could lure sailors to their deaths. Or maybe it’s just Gerry.

“You can’t possibly find this entertaining,” Jon says, leaning over to root through his backpack until his hand closes around his cigarettes. “We don’t have to spend our time together talking about numbers.”

Gerry flicks his quick fingers, the water sloshing around with his movements. _Better than sitting alone._

Jon frowns as he pulls out a smoke, tapping it once against his knee to try and shake off some of the lingering damp that pervades the air of the abandoned aquarium. “All the better reason for me not to waste what little company you get.”

 _Look who thinks so highly of himself,_ Gerry raises an eyebrow in mocking judgment. _Maybe you’re not my only visitor._

“Oh, is that so?” Jon balances the end of the cigarette between his lips and clicks the lighter once, twice, three times before it finally catches, a single wavering point of light in the dim gray. “Mr. Popular.”

_I think some of the rats around here have a crush on me._

“If you kiss one, maybe it’ll turn out to be a prince.”

 _Snow White._ Gerry knocks twice on the front of the tank. The dull sound drops heavy through the empty air. _Glass coffin._

Jon isn’t sure where Gerry learned all his pop culture references. Jon certainly hasn’t been reading him fairy tales on his many excursions to the aquarium. He’s rather lost his taste for children’s literature in general. But Gerry always claims he’s from here, maybe it filtered in over all these years.

“I bet none of those rats bring you smokes.” Jon rolls up onto his knees and shuffles forward until he can hold the butt of his cigarette up to the glass. Gerry sinks down, his long, graceful tail coiling down into the dark at the bottom of the tank, and presses his lips to the glass. They sit in a long moment of silence, Jon leaning his shoulder on the cool edge of the tank, Gerry closing his eyes and pretending...something. Jon doesn’t know what. That he’s human? That he’s like Jon? That he can take air so for granted that he’d choose to fill his lungs with tar just to feel something?

Gerry pulls back away into the tank and Jon has to crane his neck to catch his words.

_The rats are too smart to waste themselves on smoking. Not like us._

“Hey,” Jon jabs the glowing butt of his smoke towards Gerry vindictively before pulling it back for another long drag. “You’re the one who’s always telling me I’m smart.”

 _You are smart, Jon._ Jon loves the way Gerry signs his name, like a book being opened, one handed. _That’s why you’d better get back to studying. Oxford awaits._

“Oxford, huh.” Jon sets his head back against the glass with a thump. “Maybe I shouldn’t go.”

Jon doesn’t want to turn around to see what Gerry is saying. He doesn’t have to anyway, he can guess it well enough by the furious sloshing of water behind his back. Probably something like _what are you saying?_ Or _Oxford’s been all you’ve wanted for years!_ Or _how could you just give up like this?_

“I’m not _giving up_ on it.” Jon pulls himself back up to sitting with a groan, turning so he can face Gerry. “I’m just trying to give it proper thought. Consider all the factors.”

 _Factors._ Gerry parrots back at him, his face and fingers dripping with sarcasm.

“You know what I mean,” Jon scowls. “The things I’d be leaving behind.”

 _Can’t wait to hear you tell your grandmother you’re dropping out of school for a fling with a handsome fish._ Gerry puts the backs of his hands to his cheeks and flaps them like gills at Jon.

Jon feels his cheeks go hot with frustration and embarrassment. “I’m not talking about, about a _fling_ , Gerry, I’m talking about you living in a cage in the dark, all alone, _forever_.”

_The rats—_

“Can you not joke around about this for two seconds, Gerry?” Jon slams a fist into the front of the glass and Gerry flinches back in shock, his long hair drifting back through the water after him. “Even if I came back for every holiday we’d only be able to see each other what, four times a _year?_ I can’t just _abandon_ you to this. I can’t just leave you _alone_.”

Gerry stares at Jon like he’d never considered the possibility before. Jon doesn’t want to think about the empty, silent years Gerry must have lived, the weeks of nothing in between Jon’s visits. What sort of person would Jon be if he went off to University, escaped the doldrums of Bournemouth, and left his best friend behind, even more trapped than Jon had ever been? It wasn’t fair.

_I’ve been too selfish._

“What?” In his tank, Gerry curls his chest down into itself, his long, wiry tail whipping back and forth with nervous energy.

 _You should leave. This town._ Gerry brings his hands in and presses them tight to his chest. _Me._

“If you’re trying to convince me you’re fine, you’re doing a terrible job.” Jon pulls the cigarette out of his mouth and crushes it out against the damp ground.

 _I thought it would be fine if it was only temporary._ Gerry’s fingers flutter as he searches for the word. _An indulgence. But you can’t get attached. The longer you stay here, the more danger of her finding you._

“Can’t get attached? Gerry, you’re—” Jon shakes his head, trying to focus on the important bits first. “Who is going to find me?”

Slowly, miserably, Gerry uncurls three fingers and taps them softly against his palm once, and then again.

_My mother._

Jon’s imagination is immediately filled with thoughts of leviathans, dark shapes beneath waves with huge, black mouths like voids filled with teeth. His eyes flick to the water behind Gerry where it fades into blackness, as if some monstrosity may have been lurking there all along, unseen. Gerry follows Jon’s gaze back behind him for a moment, and then shakes his head.

 _She’s human. My father is also human._ Gerry’s hands linger, his palms rubbing out the word _human_ a few more times before he finally brings a hand up and pokes himself in the chest. _I’m human._

Jon tries to meet Gerry’s eye, but he won’t look up. Out of nowhere, Jon wishes he hadn’t stubbed out his cigarette. He needs something to do with his hands. Haltingly, he draws them up and runs a palm down the back of his other fist, twisting his index finger slightly as he lowers it. The sign is awkwardly done, and lacks Gerry’s practiced grace, but it feels comfortable. Familiar. Jon repeats it again, his movements growing more confident, and finally Gerry raises his head and watches.

_What happened?_

Gerry laughs, silent and humorless, the air of it bubbling up from his gills. _You wouldn’t believe me._

 _I am talking to a fish._ Jon swims his upright hand back and forth as sarcastically as he can possibly manage, narrowing his eyes at Gerry. _I will believe._

Gerry sighs, letting the bubbles trickle from his mouth, up his cheeks, and tangle in his messy hair. Jon waits patiently, watching the eyes on Gerry’s knuckles twitch back and forth as he tries to gather his thoughts. _There was this book._

The story isn’t very long in the end, and Jon listens silently to the whole thing, only interrupting when Gerry’s vocabulary outpaces Jon’s sign language fluency and he has to fetch the old, dog-eared dictionary. Gerry tells Jon of his mother, of her twisted desire for a magical lineage, of his strange education and homelife, of the dangerous books she showed to him. He tells Jon about the transformation, his fingers dancing nervously past describing the pain of it all, and how his mother tried to study him after the fact. _Determine what worth I would be, like this,_ he says, smiling grimly as if it’s no more horrifying than Jon’s grandmother forcing him to join the track team in secondary school. He explains that she’d bought the property rights to the aquarium when he’d gotten too big for the tub ( _supernatural puberty,_ Gerry signs five times while laughing at his own joke before Jon finally finds it in the book) since he needed to be in water more than most people and she wanted him where she could keep an eye on him. It was condemned and abandoned so it was pretty cheap. A handy storage facility, until she figured out what to do with him now that he couldn’t _carry on the legacy._

 _She comes every night to feed me,_ Gerry finishes up, poking his hand in towards his mouth. _I guess that must mean I’m still valuable to her._

Jon shuts the dictionary in his lap with a thump. “You used to live outside the tank?”

 _I can breathe air just fine,_ Gerry signs with a shrug, _I just go pale and twitchy if I haven’t been submerged in a few days._

“Okay.” Jon pushes the dictionary to the ground next to his forgotten calculus textbook and rises to standing. “I understand.”

 _Jon?_ Gerry’s hands open like a book as he signs Jon’s name, his eyebrows coming together in confusion. Jon steps forward and rests a hand on the glass and Gerry meets it with his own. So close, and yet so far away.

“Stay here,” Jon says, pointlessly, as if there’s anything else Gerry could ever do but sit and wait for Jon. “I’ll be right back.”

It is remarkably easy to buy an axe in Bournemouth. Even for a gangly teenager.

Jon slips under the broken door, splashes through the stagnant puddles on the ground, and marches straight to the back of the aquarium. Gerry is waiting for him there, pale face pressed up to the glass as he stares, open mouthed, at the unwieldy axe in Jon’s shaking arms.

“I’m not leaving you here with her one second longer,” Jon says as he hoists the axe up onto his shoulder.

Gerry holds up a palm and pokes two fingers into it insistently, almost panicked. _Plan? Do you have a plan?_

“No.” 

With a satisfying _crunch_ the blade hits the glass. Gerry goes scattering backwards, his tail whipping beneath him and a manic delight starting to creep into his eyes. Chipped pieces of glass tumble to the floor as Jon draws the axe back and swings down again. The splinter is audible as it spreads up the entire face of the gigantic tank, cracking down towards the ground and up towards the ceiling in dizzying, expanding spiderwebs. The entire tank creaks with the strain of it, and Jon barely has time to throw an arm up to protect his face as the glass wall in front of him shatters.

The wall of water hits him a moment later, gallons and gallons of old, stale water rushing up and over him like a tidal wave, lifting him off his feet and tossing him to the ground. His head bounces off the concrete with an audible thud. Jon’s vision swirls for a moment and he tries to breathe but can only gasp in water instead. 

And then something hits his chest with a thump and Jon convulses, coughing out the water in his lungs. All around him, the flood is draining away, spreading out to fill the floor of the massive aquarium. Jon cracks his eyes open, blinking through the water on his lashes, and sees Gerry draped on top of him, face pressed tight into his chest. He’s warm in a way Jon hadn’t imagined him being, and Jon’s leg is hot where he can feel the strange sensation of Gerry’s tail coiling around him, squeezing in tight.

Everywhere, Jon can feel Gerry’s hands moving on his skin, half-aborted words he can barely parse from movement alone. Knocking him on the head, pressing a fist into his palm, tapping a flat hand over his ear.

_Idiot. Stupid. Dangerous._

Jon tries to laugh, but it comes out like coughing instead, and Gerry pushes himself up off Jon’s chest just enough to fix him with a worried look. Jon lifts a hand and pushes at Gerry’s long, unruly hair where it has plastered itself wildly to the edges of his face. Here in this moment, he looks nothing like the strange, ethereal beauty Jon saw that first day, floating in the tank. He’s just a mess. Just like Jon.

“And you thought I was smart,” Jon rasps out with a lopsided grin. 

Gerry kisses him. He tastes like stale water and salt and rotten fish, but his lips are soft and warm and he is _here_. Not behind glass. Not mere inches away. He’s here in Jon’s arms, where he can hold him tight and keep him safe. 

“We’ll figure out what to do,” Jon whispers, pulling Gerry in so that he can nestle into the side of Jon’s neck. “You can stay in the ocean when you need to, somewhere you can actually be free.”

Gerry lifts a hand to Jon’s chest and rests it there as he sticks out a thumb and twists it once, back and forth. _And then?_

“And then, once I pass my A levels,” Jon squeezes Gerry tightly, just once. “We need to find that book.”

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Valentines, Geo!! I hope this is what you were looking for from your exchange present. Sorry that your initial gifter dropped out, but I did my best to rush this out so that you could get it as soon as possible because no one should be left hanging on Valentines day!!! It helped that it was an absolute blast to write, so I sped right through.
> 
> Thank you so much to Julia and Alex for helping talk me through the outline of this fic and keep it a reasonable length to write in a week, and again to Julia for the beta!
> 
> Oh, and happy fantasy week! This wasn't technically written for that but it fits so I'm claiming it. If you liked this, you can find me on tumblr [@apatheticbutterflies](https://apatheticbutterflies.tumblr.com/) I post writing and occasional meta!! I'm very fun and nice :D


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